Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Hitec Ecosystems and India

Yesterday was listening through a keynote address by Dr. C. K. Prahalad titled “Emerging Hi-Tech Ecosystems” from the Software 2006 conference. Speaker starts with defining what is a ecosystem and what are the major ecosystems which have drawn considerable attention in recent past. The talk is packed with lot of stats and some are really surprising like the way software exports grew in India from mere few millions in the start of 90s to 10 billion by 2005. The talk revolves around economics at India and US. The speaker mentions that India is no more an outsourcing partner but innovation partner for US.

One great point which the speaker brings up is how India can help reduce down the cost of innovation and diffusing the innovation by its large pool of skilled labor and booming manufacturing and other sectors like pharma, services etc. He mentions on how ecosystems can interact with each other by complementing and contributing to each other. An example he gave was that IT and Automotive industry in India are concentrated in 3 parts of India that is Delhi-Noida, Mumbai-Pune and Chennai. The point he makes is how should the automotive industry leverage on the software sector for innovating new technology know-how of doing the things in better and efficient way.

The talk also brings up a great thought of making IT and software affordable for the 80% of underprivileged population of the world. He gives an example of a village from central Madhya Pradesh were the farmers have started using computers and Internet to keep them updated about the weather or using the latest technology and novel farming practices or the latest prices of commodity goods at Chicago Trade Exchange which in turn would help them get the better prices for there goods. This particular thought is close to what Vinod Khosla said in a conversation at Web 2.0 2005 conference held in Sept,2005 where he mentioned of using Internet to deliver the high end education to all the underprivileged people in the remote corners of the world. An striking example he gave was to have a sort of remote Harvard university where 400,000 are listening to a lecture from a eminent scholar from remote corners of the world.